A Distant Eden Read online

  A Distant Eden

  by Lloyd Tackitt

  Copyright © 2012 by Lloyd L. Tackitt. All rights reserved.

  First Kindle Edition: March 2012

  Cover: Streetlight Graphics

  LICENSE NOTES

  All rights reserved. This eBook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  DISCLAIMER

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  To Susan and Cori—without your dedicated support this couldn’t have happened.

  Introduction

  This is a novel, but not the usual type. It is a cross between fiction and survival instruction manual. Instead of the usual instructional style of writing about survival, I chose to employ a story about people in the act of surviving. This has the benefit of showing how a particular technique is used while also showing the necessary mindset or attitude of the person who survives. Mindset is possibly 85% of survival and it is difficult to describe. It is easier to show a person shooting another person without hesitation, than it is to explain why it is a stupid idea to let the bad guy draw first.

  This style of writing also has some minuses. These characters don’t have the significant psychological flaws that are supposed to make fictional characters interesting to read about. A character with a survival mindset doesn’t wait until the bad guy has him cornered on a high ledge and is hanging by one finger before he finally reacts the right way. In real life those people die, and quickly. The miraculous escape from a cliff hanger situation is just that, miraculous. It only happens once in a million times.

  To be a survivor is to think ahead, avoid the cliff and shoot the bad guy the first time you see him. As Roman says, “Shoot first and don’t bother to ask questions later, the answers are always the same, you have food and they want to take it from you.” In here you won’t find weak sister heroes; you’ll find good guys that are almost indistinguishable from the bad guys—because the people who survive will have many of the same traits. They have to because it will be a harsh world. A hammer used by a bad guy or a good guy is still a hammer. Tools are tools, and mindset is a tool. It is the most important survival tool of all. So you’ll see that these characters don’t go through the usual character development arc found in typical fiction. They start off with the survivor’s mindset or they die, they don’t get many chances to learn.

  The other minus is this style uses what critics call information dumping. I use it to explain what the world might look like and how to use what you have at hand. It is a compromise between telling too much and not telling enough, a tough balancing act. There are survival techniques, such as disinfecting water with the sun’s ultra-violet rays, or the solar cooker, that are described just enough that the reader can then go on-line and research and get all of the details. The compromise comes from not giving all those details in this book. This is to try and keep the story moving. But there are some fairly long narrative passages used to describe the after-effects of the grid loss, or to explain somewhat simple techniques such as building fish traps.

  So, take this for what it is—a hybrid instruction manual-novel with the inherent weaknesses and strengths of combining the two. I fervently hope you never need this information, but if you do, remember this—there is very little difference between how good guys and bad guys act when in survival mode. Don’t let the bad guys have any chance at all. None. You’ll see what I mean.

  Prologue

  Thanksgiving Day

  Roman and Sarah were happy because they did not know that in less than a month, Roman would be a cop-killer and they would be living day to day in pure survival mode.

  This was a rare Thanksgiving with both of the kids and their spouses, all six of the grandkids and their nephew Adrian home for the feast. It was a typical North Texas winter day; cool, and a bit cloudy. Kids were constantly running in and out of the house, and football was on television with the sound low. The remains of the meal were still on the table; way too much turkey and dressing, and far too many pies. The adults were groaning from having, in spite of their best intentions, over-eaten. Few days could claim to be better.

  Roman and Adrian were talking about Adrian’s current assignment at Fort Hood. Adrian said, “I’ll be there for a couple of years I think, assigned to that unit that I can’t talk about. We come and go quite a bit so if you call and can’t reach me, don’t be surprised.”

  “Surprised?” Roman responded, “Hardly. I know what you do, and I don’t figure to reach you in a hurry. But you know where to get me just about all the time. It sure is good to see you—what’s it been this time, two years?”

  Adrian said, “Yes, sir. Last time I was at Fort Dix. So, what are we going to do after the game? Got any plans?”

  “Hell with it,” Roman replied. “I’m not waiting on the game; those Cowboys are stinkin-up my living room again. I’m heading out to do some fishing. Got plenty of tackle here. Wanta go?”

  “You bet! Where’s the stuff?”

  Roman hollered out, “Fishing trip! Who’s coming?” and was greeted with a chorus of eager voices.

  It took a while to get everyone outfitted, especially the kids, but soon enough they were all sitting on the riverbank with bait in the water. Roman’s son Jerry poked Adrian in the ribs and asked, “Dad, you still putting food back for the big one?”

  Roman nodded. “I was reading an article just this week. Seems that the North and South Pole have a habit of changing places periodically. Actually, it has happened a lot during earth’s history, and it’s not rhythmic, either. It might change five times in a hundred thousand years, then stay stable for a million. No one can predict when it’ll happen again. No one knows why it flips. They know the last one was about eight hundred thousand years ago, but that’s all anyone seems willing to say for certain. No one can guess what will happen to us when it flips again, assuming we’re still here. It might cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, or it might not. It will screw up electronics, I would think.”

  Roman’s daughter Shirley joined the ribbing. “Have you ever added up all the various ways that an apocalypse can happen? From listening to you all my life it seems there must be thousands!”

  “Thousands? Might seem like that, but I think there are only about a doz
en or so likely ways. But there isn’t really any way to count them because there are possibilities that we can’t predict. Things we just don’t know, and can’t know. How do you count those? Suppose that the red tides that you read about mutate and start rapidly reproducing and creating a poisonous gas. That’s more or less how the earth got oxygen, so it isn’t all that farfetched of an idea. But how do you count things you don’t know?

  “We know for sure that history tells us there have been numerous mass extinctions on this planet, and to believe that we are safe from more of the same kind of global catastrophe is the type of conceit that made people believe the earth was the center of the universe. I may be off center, no pun intended. Maybe I think about it too much—but it is plain foolish not to give it due consideration.”

  Shirley laughed and said, “Calm down, Dad, no one’s calling you a crank. Even if you are one. I was just curious about how many ways humans can be wiped out.”

  “I don’t know,” Roman replied seriously. “I hope it never happens. But there are enough obvious ways, and it has happened enough times, that a betting man wouldn’t bet against it. So I read about it, and about survival techniques, and I put away a few supplies; but I keep my fingers crossed that I am wasting my time and my money.

  “You kids keeping up with the supplies I gave you? Got them in a cool place? Remember to keep those radios covered up with foil?”

  In unison, there was an assenting good-natured groan as his children once again answered in the affirmative, while rolling their eyes.

  Roman, completely aware of how they felt grinned happily at them.

  ~ * * * ~

  November 22 to December 21

  The sun, a super hot ball of plasma, generates immense magnetic fields that writhe and tangle in constant heaving motion. Some of these magnetic loops occasionally become so entangled that they snap, releasing tremendous bursts of energy. The sun constantly radiates energy and particles in all directions; but the bursts from these localized coronal mass ejections are phenomenal in size and energy.

  The earth also has a magnetic field. This field acts as a shield against most of the sun’s emissions. The earth’s magnetic shield causes the sun’s emissions to flow around it, protecting the earth’s atmosphere and surface from being constantly bombarded by x-rays, gamma rays, ions and protons. This magnetic shield is in large part responsible for creating and maintaining conditions favorable for life to exist.

  There are giant storms that rage within the sun with vast fields of magnetic lines that war with each other. Occasionally these storms explode from the sun’s surface in fiery arcs, roiling out like colossal bridges for hundreds of thousands of miles. These bursts eject, at millions of miles per hour, dense clouds of electrified gas weighing billions of tons. When they happen to be pointed at the earth they can reach it in as little as fourteen hours, hitting the earth’s magnetic fields like a sledgehammer crashing down on a walnut—blowing the magnetic shield out of its way and bombarding Earth with the dense storm of particles. These storms, on the sun’s scale, are frequent.

  The storm particles cause damage to the earth and its occupants. Stroke and heart attack deaths double during solar storms. Human intelligent quotients can temporarily shrink by as much as twenty points. Metal structures have electrical currents induced into them. Radio waves are blocked. Electrical transformers overload and begin to make loud rattling sounds as they heat up and explode.

  The earth’s magnetic shield has “cracks” in it that—when conditions are ripe—allow protons and ions to enter inside and build up. This “pre-loaded” condition, when subsequently hit by a strong coronal mass ejection from the sun, magnifies the initial blast. This extra shock can simulate the electro-magnetic-pulse from a nuclear blast, shutting down sensitive electronic equipment.

  Chapter 1

  December 21

  When the power went off, shutting down Roman’s computer and the office lights, he didn’t expect he would be advising a fellow worker to murder his wife and commit suicide within a few hours. For now, however brief this “now” was, his world remained sane. Normal.

  Dead silence rung for a second. Then there was a chorus of moaning and cursing from the cubicles as work was lost in the blink of an eye.

  “Damn,” Roman groaned to himself. He looked out the window of his 20th floor cubicle, out across downtown Fort Worth. “Hey, Jim,” he said to the occupant of the adjacent cubicle, “look at that; all the cars have stopped on the interstate. Must be a big wreck somewhere.”

  The words had barely left his mouth when he noticed a helicopter heading for the ground in a controlled crash, auto-rotating. The chopper disappeared behind a building, but he saw no smoke or signs of explosion. Roman sincerely hoped the pilot was uninjured. He looked again at the traffic. He could see the intersection of Interstate 20 and Interstate 35; all cars were stopped not just in one direction, but in all directions on all highways. The surface streets were just the same.

  A glint in the sky, the sun reflecting off an airliner, caught his eye. Roman watched in growing horror as the jet liner plummeted straight into the ground, erupting into a fireball, two or three miles away. As he watched, another identical fireball erupted further away, just on the horizon. Then another.

  Finally, the light bulb went on in his mind. “Jim,” he almost shouted, his voice choked with tension. “We’re in either a major solar storm or a nuclear EMP event. I’m out of here; I’m heading home right now.”

  Thinking only of getting to Sarah, Roman quickly took the stairs down the twenty stories, and then with aching legs walked as fast as he could to the parking garage a block away. There was no longer any need to get his supervisor’s permission to leave; he was no longer employed—no one was. The city was silent, the quietest he had ever heard it. All the background noise, the traffic, sirens, jackhammers, train horns; everything had stopped.

  His truck starting now was unlikely—but he’d thought on this for a long time and made the necessary preparations. In his glove compartment, wrapped in two heavy sheets of aluminum foil, were six sets of replacement fuses. If the truck’s computer brain hadn’t been fried, he had a chance.

  Roman inserted the key and turned it; nothing, absolutely nothing. A shudder went through him, the feeling usually explained away as “someone stepped on my grave.” It took him twenty minutes to replace all the fuses, and then...it started! It wasn’t running completely normal; the engine would not exceed fifteen-hundred rpm. Apparently, the brain was partially damaged because it was in “limp mode,” a secondary setting that allowed the driver to cripple along until he got home. Slow, but a lot better than walking.

  Roman’s home was eighty miles away; a drive that took an hour and a half. Best case scenario, it’d take three hours to get home. Worst case, it might take days. But Roman had chosen to live that far away for a reason. Today, that reason had reared its head.

  As Roman backed out of his parking spot and slowly headed for the down ramp a figure suddenly appeared at his window, beating on it with his fist. It was Fred from the ninth floor, another employee that Roman had occasionally been on work teams with. Fred was in a panic, his face drained of blood. Roman stopped the truck and rolled his window down. Fred was almost yelling, “My car won’t start! I have to get home. Something terrible is happening. I have to get home. Would you take me home?”

  There had once been a time where Fred wanted to car pool with Roman, because he lived just thirty miles south of Fort Worth, in Alvarado. Roman had declined.

  Frustration apparent in his voice, Roman said, “The best I can do is drop you off at the nearest exit off the interstate. I don’t have the time to drive you all the way home.”

  Fred looked at Roman as if he was unsure whether to believe he meant it or not. “Are you kidding? You couldn’t drive me the extra ten miles to my house from the highway?”

  “No,” said Roman. “I have to get home and I don’t have time for detours. Sorry, but those ten miles for
you are twenty for me, and you saw how congested the roads are. That could cost me hours. Of course, you can wait for another ride, but I don’t think there will be one. Ten miles from home is a lot better than forty. Your choice though.”

  Fred got into the passenger seat and Roman drove out of the garage. The office was two blocks off the interstate, and usually he went straight south on I-35. Having seen from his office window that I-35 was packed with stalled cars –cars that went dead when their electronics fried and fuses blew—he decided to try the side roads. He was hoping for more maneuverability until getting out of town. Speed was not the issue.

  For a while there was silence. Eventually Fred asked Roman, “What do you think is happening?”

  Roman had enjoyed studying and discussing the various ways that a near extinction event could happen, and there were a number of them. There was the Yellowstone caldera exploding, Earth being hit by an asteroid, a new ice age, global warming, the steady comeback of diseases as they became drug resistant, nuclear war, a gamma ray storm from space, new diseases escaping, bio-weapons, bio-terrorism, swapping of the magnetic poles, plagues and more. At an early age, he found talking about them to be something to confine to family and close friends. Most people didn’t want to hear about the real possibilities that were outside their control. Some people looked at him kind of funny if he even brought the subject up.

  But now that he was actually involved in one, he found himself reluctant to talk about it. He didn’t want to try to explain to Fred what he thought was happening. Besides, he doubted Fred would grasp it. The conversation would only be futile.